ONE of the fastest ways to grow your company's brand using Twitter is by understanding the three basics of what, how and when.

With the latest research from Mediabistro centre showing that 67 per cent of people following a brand on Twitter are more likely to buy from them, it's key to get involved.

What? Writing tweets that encourage retweeting by others is the quickest way of growing your reach.

How? Research from author Dan Zarella who analysed 30m tweets showed that words such as 'Twitter', 'free', 'social', 'media' and 'please' encourage retweeting while 'lol', 'work', 'bed', 'night' and 'home' have the opposite effect.

Keep tweets well below the 140 character threshold as it allows your followers to personalise the retweets with their own additions.

When? Bit.ly is a well-established website which specialises in shortening links to websites. It's used in millions of tweets weekly.

They have found from research that tweeting between 1pm and 3pm returns the highest click rates among all time slots. The best time is Monday to Friday during work hours. Wednesday afternoons are best of all.

After 8pm and on weekends the chance of tweet views, and therefore retweets, lessens.